floof.org
The U.S. government is warning that smart locks securing entry to an estimated 50,000 dwellings nationwide contain hard-coded credentials that can be used to remotely open any of the locks. The lock's maker Chirp Systems remains unresponsive, even though it was first notified about the critical weakness in March 2021. Meanwhile, Chirp's parent company, RealPage, Inc., is being sued by multiple U.S. states for allegedly colluding with landlords to illegally raise rents.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/04/crickets-from-chirp-systems-in-smart-lock-key-leak/
WHERE THE WEB IS GOING: The convergence of LLMs and web advertising will lead to "ads" consisting of several hundred gigabytes of javascript containing a (weighted) neural network designed to generate unique per-user video advertisements—generated on your computer at your expense to ensure the imagery is unique and evades AI-based ad-blockers.
"AI spam" is an entire AI, squatting on your CPU and making it glow dull red as it works out how to capture your attention.
Welcome to the spamularity.
Whoa. This seems really important. New study suggests that changing the charging protocol from the presently common constant current charge to a high frequency pulsed square wave current could DOUBLE the lifetime of Li-ion batteries.
i.e. the 8 year life of an EV battery back could be extended to a much more reasonable 16 years. That's huge.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/04/240409123909.htm
An improved charging protocol might help lithium-ion batteries to last much longer. Charging with a high-frequency pulsed current reduces aging effects, an international team demonstrated.ScienceDaily
Bikes overtake cars as means of transport in Paris https://www.thelocal.fr/20240412/bikes-overtake-cars-as-means-of-transport-in-paris
Forget "We are not Amsterdam", it is "but we are not Paris", now...
TRUMP TRIAL UPDATES
Trump jerked awake after his lawyer placed notes loudly in front of him....
#AureFreePress #News #press #headline #BreakingNews #Breaking
A few brave Singaporeans unfurled this banner in front of the iconic Marina Bay Sands, in a country where any public protest is illegal without prior approval and approved protests are only allowed at one park (and the authorities already said all registered protest applications relating to Gaza will be denied)
If they were foreigners they would almost certainly be deported. As citizens they’ll definitely see some legal action
https://www.wethecitizens.net/here-comes-the-wong-administration/
Lawrence Wong will become Singapore's fourth prime minister on 15 May. What sort of premier will he be, in what sort of a Singapore?Kirsten Han (We, The Citizens)
I mean this is a country that put a man in jail for 15 days for holding up a smiley face sign (they’ll say ‘he should have chosen the fine, but that’s not quite the point)
I grew up being told (by teachers!) that if I made my political opinions known I would almost certainly be sued out of existence and out of my pants. That’s why I am awed by the people back home who do choose direct action
Jolovan Wham faces large fines over incident in which he briefly held a smiley face sign outside a police stationRebecca Ratcliffe (The Guardian)
If SpaceX can put a base price on their website for a satellite launch, you can put the base price of your f-in co-working space in Birchwood.
No, I don't want to ‘email you for prices' so I'll end up on your crap mailing list. JUST SAY HOW MUCH IT IS.
Wow, after 25 years of Unix experience, I learned that you can filter output in #less.
Press ampersand (&) and enter a regex to show only lines matching the regex.
Press ampersand (&) and then exclamation mark (!) to apply an inverse filter.
Apparently Usenet is back, under new management, and actually doing something about the spam problem.
Nice to see.
Usenet, IRC, SMTP, FTP, Gopher -- these are the original protocols of the Internet, before the Web ate the universe. Things were better when they were dominant in their areas. We were outside corporate control, governments could barely be bothered to participate let alone police, we considered these things to be solved problems.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/30/usenet_revival/
Alive and still quite vigorous considering its ageLiam Proven (The Register)
tl;dr there's a NNTP server at https://www.eternal-september.org/ and you'll have to provide an email address to register, but it doesn't cost money.
#opinion I don't think you can solve this problem with technology. Politicians like Bush/Cheney stole our Internet and gave it away to large corporations. It was the victim of a larger campaign to turn us all into consumer slaves that made the nascent Internet look like a tiny dormouse standing next to an elephant. We need to stop letting companies fund propaganda, and hold them accountable for externalities. Then the Internet will "magically" get better, because Google imploded f/i so they can't block me from running an email server.
It's not that I've abandoned SMTP; it's that people have forbidden me from using it via their DKIM fearmongering and DNS blacklists. To fix this, we need to change society, i.e. organizing our local communities and moving up from there. Though I'll be the first to say DNS was shit from day one, designed to be monetized.
We are finally beginning to see mainstream outlets tell the truth:
Very little plastic is recyclable, or recycled.
The "chasing arrows" were put on the packaging and the lie that plastic is recyclable was pushed so municipalities in the 80's wouldn't ban plastic.
"In 1994 an Exxon executive told the staff of the plastics council that when it comes to recycling, "We are committed to the activities but not committed to the results.""
I agree with the statement in this article: plastic will never be recyclable, not in the traditional sense, unless it is broken down into constituent atoms and those are used in other things. The material is just not amenable to it.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/critics-call-out-plastics-industry-over-fraud-of-plastic-recycling/
Only 5 to 6% of plastic waste produced in the U.S. is actually recycled. A new report accuses the plastics industry of a decades-long campaign to "mislead" the public about the viability of recycling.Ben Tracy (CBS News)
It's so much worse. Check out all the new data being revealed including how the marketing campaigns to brainwash the public
https://climateintegrity.org/uploads/media/Fraud-of-Plastic-Recycling-2024.pdf
https://climateintegrity.org/uploads/media/Fraud-of-Plastic-Recycling-2024.pdf
That's an amazing article, and yeah I don't think there are words for how cooking these people alive would be too merciful to them. It brings up an excellent example in the 50's where 80 children suffocated in plastic dry cleaner bags, and the industry said the parents were to blame for trying to reuse the dryer bags. So like:
Parent: You sold me a new dryer bag and my child just died horribly suffocating on it while I struggled to save them.
The Society of the Plastics Industry: Well, you should have known to throw away the bag. Really we're the victims here.
Interesting, there may have been another social engineering takeover attempt
AAA game development in the 90s: by creating this transition effect while sweeping music plays, the player will be engaged enough to not notice the game loading secretly in the background!
AAA game development in the 2020s: basically just a glorified map and UI editor in one of five different engines
American wild horses are catching a break. Courts have ordered that the round-ups conducted by the Bureau of Land Management is inhumane and indefinitely halted any future ones until their practices and methods are revised to consider the animals in question and the surrounding habitats.
#AmericanWest #HorseLovers #AmericanHorses #WildHorses
https://share.newsbreak.com/6neuhgy9
RVers traveling in the West often enjoy the sight of wild horses running on the open range. Travelers who cherish this vestige of the Old West...Randall Brink (NewsBreak)
YES THIS PLEASE
Not politically feasible? KEEP YAMMERING ABOUT IT until the overton window shifts. MAKE it politically feasible!
(Update: apparently they already do this in some countries -- all the more reason to press for it here.)
![screenshot of a (TwitX? Tumblr?) post -- the key bit is:
[original post]
class warfare idea: tie minimum wage to average local rent. make the bosses go to war with the landlords
[reply]
This is actually something | was thinking about is that rent can not exceed 1/3 of monthly minimum wage income. So let's say state is on federal Minimum wage which is about 1100 a month so in that state no matter what rent on any place could not exceed 370 dollars. Even if minimum wage was 15 dollars (about 2400 a month) max rent could be 800 So if landlord want more money they would have to fight bosses and... [runs off end of screenshot]](https://floof.org/photo/preview/640/458597 "screenshot of a (TwitX? Tumblr?) post -- the key bit is:
[original post]
class warfare idea: tie minimum wage to average local rent. make the bosses go to war with the landlords
[reply]
This is actually something | was thinking about is that rent can not exceed 1/3 of monthly minimum wage income. So let's say state is on federal Minimum wage which is about 1100 a month so in that state no matter what rent on any place could not exceed 370 dollars. Even if minimum wage was 15 dollars (about 2400 a month) max rent could be 800 So if landlord want more money they would have to fight bosses and... [runs off end of screenshot]")
Corporate crime is notoriously underpoliced and underprosecuted. Mostly, that's because we just choose not to do anything about it. American corporations commit crimes at 20X the rate of real humans, and their crimes are far worse than any crime committed by a human, but they are almost never prosecuted:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/12/no-criminals-no-crimes/#get-out-of-jail-free-card
1/
This ruling shows how far removed judges are from modern day life and human error with online systems.
The decision does nothing to uphold the law or give meaning to the institution of marriage being decided by consenting adults.
London law firm admits to error but judge says final order cannot be overturnedEmine Sinmaz (The Guardian)
I grew up around individuals who always demonized the liberal and creative arts. I followed closely in their footsteps - initially, into my college years. But I always had a bit of a creative flair, but it was always smushed into a “How can this be used at work/business?” mold.
Eventually as I met more people I began to appreciate writers, artists, creative people. These were people who “Didn’t contribute anything” but often they actually contributed a LOT. Many make life worth living.
According to https://www.carbonintensity.org.uk
9 of the 14 UK regions have a carbon intensity per kWh of generation of less than 10gCO2eq!
All of them are less than 45g, and four are 0 or 1!
The UK average isn't forecast to go above 90g in the next 48 hours (the forecast length)
National Grid ESO, in partnership with Environmental Defense Fund Europe, University of Oxford Department of Computer Science and WWF, have developed a Carbon Intensity forecast for the GB electricity system, with weather data provided by the Met Off…www.carbonintensity.org.uk
⚠️ TRADE OFFER ⚠️
You receive: Rat 🐀
I receive: Hugs 💛
📸: @\AvaliKali on Twitter
#MeowMonday #FursuitEveryday #furry #fursuit
Redirect `.idk` domains using Wikipedia. Contribute to aaronjanse/dns-over-wikipedia development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
People, always: Mozilla, please just make a web browser
Mozilla, 2014: here’s a phone!
Mozilla, 2018: all in on VR!
Mozilla, 2022: let’s do crypto!
Mozilla, 2024: hurrah AI!
We should really be giving ourselves a gold star on the "capacity" basis.
It is still rare for it to be as good as this, but as time goes by it will be more and more common.
The actors are good eggs and deserve better than to be perennially associated with, you know, that writer.Pajiba
Quick reminder - we host a fast local (Central US/Austin) Masto instance with a bunch of cool geeky furs - Tiggi.es is open for registrations (and not only for tigs) and we’ve increased our media cache size due to a brand new server installation. We’re a 100% enterprise NVMe SSD instance :)
We also host a Masto Relay at https://relay.tiggi.es and a PixelFed (Fedi Instagram) instance at https://pixel.tiggi.es that has several slots left open.
We don’t ask for donations to keep us running, only that folks contribute what they can to animal rescues or sanctuaries. Burrs appreciate ya!
Please boost. :)
Pixel Tiggies! 🐯 is an LGBTQIA+🏳️🌈/BIPOC:bipoc:/Body Positive👍🏾/Furry🐶/Tech💻/Geek🤓/Creative🎨/Automotive🚘/Maker🛠️/Gaming-centric👾/Photog📸 Pixelfed instance run by Burrs and pals powered by ☀️ energy!Pixel Tiggies!
Her: "K, you're a homeowner with 100% equity, why are you rooting for a housing market crash?"
Me: "That's exactly why I'm rooting for it. I own this pile of wood and bricks, and the land it's on, outright. Long as the property taxes get paid, I'm beyond the reach of capitalism's attempt to enslave me under threat of homelessness. Unless I sell the place, I never have to think about rent or the market again. So fuck the investors, let their assets depreciate, so my friends and family can maybe afford to join me in escaping the rental treadmill."
